I’m the West Coast representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. I was a political columnist for SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle online) from 2004-2008. I've written for the Algemeiner, Daily Caller, Washington Examiner, Independent Journal Review, American Thinker, FrontPage Magazine, Jihad Watch, Family Security Matters, Accuracy In Media, Newsbusters, Israel National News, Jewish Press, J-The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, and many others.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Carter Refuses to Debate Dershowitz

After going on and on about the alleged lack of debate in the United States regarding the Mideast conflict, former President Jimmy Carter is now refusing put his own ideas to the test.

Former President Carter has decided not to visit Brandeis University to talk about his new book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" because he does not want to debate Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz as the university had requested.

"I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz," Carter told The Boston Globe. "There is no need ... for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."

That's interesting that Carter would accuse Dershowitz of knowing "nothing about the situation in Palestine" when he himself seems to know nothing of the true history of the region. Instead, he simply repeats the same false talking points that have been promulgated through years of anti-Israel propaganda.

David Horowitz sets Carter and the real history of the Mideast straight in his latest column at Frontpagemag.com:

It is a lie that Palestinians “had their own land, first of all, occupied.” This is like saying that Texans had their own land occupied by Hispanics, ignoring the fact that Hispanics were there first. The very word Palestine is a Roman appellation for the people called Philistines, who were not Arabs but red-haired sailors from the Aegean. The Jews were there as well.

In short, first of all the Jews were in the land before the Arabs.

Second of all, the Arabs who inhabited the Palestine Mandate in 1948, at the time of the creation the state of Israel, considered themselves Syrians.

Third, the Palestine Mandate was not created on land taken from the Syrians or the Arabs. It was taken from the Turks.

It was not taken from the Turks by the Jews, but by the British and the French. They took it because Turkey sided with Germany in the First World War and, of course, lost. The Turkish empire had ruled the entire region including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan for four hundred years before Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan were artificially created by the English and the French. Jordan – a state whose majority is Palestinian – occupies 80% of the Palestine Mandate. So it is a preposterous lie to say that the Palestinians had their own land and that it was occupied by the Jews.

Fourth, the individual plots of land that Jews now own were in the first instance bought from the Arabs who regarded themselves as Syrians and who lived in the area of Israel. The only property that was confiscated was confiscated as a spoil of the aggressive war that five Arab states waged against Israel from the day of its birth. Five Arab armies invaded Israel, a sovereign state, with the declared intent of “pushing the Jews into the sea.” The cry today of the Muslim majority in the Middle East is to “liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.” In other words push the Jews into the sea.

By the standards of occupation and legitimacy Jimmy Carter invokes, Israel has more legitimacy as a Jewish state than Texas does as an American state, rather than a Mexican province.

Read the entire article. And pass it on to the legions of Israel's critics who know not of what they speak.

I have been directly involved in the Free Tibet movement for years, and NO I haven't seen many kaffiyehs around!

You claim there are thousands of people being killed every year by American tanks and bullets. First - it's not thousands, check your sources. Second, their tanks and bullets are not American, but made in Israel, which has one of the most advanced arms industries in the world.

Third, you claimed that you care more about the Palestinians than the Tibetans because of alleged thousands of deaths a year... Even if this figure was true, what about the at least 2 MILLION Tibetans killed and the other couple of millions tortured and imprisoned by your Chinese heroes?

Diurnalist was pointing to this hipocrisy on the left, and you seem to thick to grasp these simple facts...

(don't get me started on the genocide in Sudan commited and FUNDED by the arabs)

My point that you were too hasty to grasp was that the occupations in Palestine and Tibet are logically disconnected. I, and many others I know, are against the oppression in Palestine and the oppression in Tibet (where did you get the idea that the 'Chinese' are my heroes? imagining a fact about someone and publishing it constitutes libel, does it not?) in any case, there are some who are for one oppression and not the other; zionists cannot co-opt the free tibet movement.

I claim that thousands are killed by American tanks and bullets every year. Read today's report on Unicef to see how right I am: Israel killed 50 Palestinian children, in Gaza alone, in July alone. Multiply by 12, and you have the children killed in Gaza. Add the children killed in the West Bank, and then the adults. Israel also killed about 10,000 in Lebanon this year. It dropped 1,000,000 cluster boms on Lebanon -in-the-last-four-days-of-the-war alone. Lebanese are still being maimed and killed from them. Add to this the hardships caused by lacking access to power and medical care. Add to this the hardships of transportation. Add to this the toll of 50% unemployment (of workers who cannot travel from one part of the Palestinian Authority to another.) Add to this the duties on Palestinian imports, paid by Palestinians, collected by Israel, and withheld.

Now you have an idea of how many people Israel kills every year.

But you also declare that they are not American tanks and bullets which kill Palestinians. I say if they are American dollars which buy them, they are American tanks and bullets. Israel is the number one recipient of US military aid. Interestingly, Israel is also the number one recipient of humanitarian aid, despite its small population, and despite its $20,000 a year gdp per head. US aid to Israel equal apx. $6,000 per Israeli citizen, per year. That allows Israel to spend 9% of its GDP on tanks, bullets, and other services of its 'advanced arms industries.'

Hypocrisy is spelled with a y, too is spelled with 2 o's. You seem to be too daft to grasp these simple facts. All of them.

There is some cross-over between Tibet and Palestine sympathizing (or "chic").

E.g., I read once that Richard Gere (who made a "Tibet speech" at one Oscar ceremony) had visited the Palestinian territories. I also know a native Californian, ethnically "white", who considers himself a "Buddhist" (a professioal photographer, he's taken some dramatic photos of the Dalai Lama) and who is knee-jerk anti-Israel.

When I hear "Buddhist" I think of someone who has abandoned Judeo-Christian discipline (not necessarily teachings, since some of them are quite similar), but with a multi-culti imprimatur tellnig them they're still "ok", still spiritually and intellectually "whole."

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I’m the West Coast representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. I was a political columnist for SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle online) from 2004-2008. I've written for the Algemeiner, Daily Caller, Washington Examiner, Independent Journal Review, American Thinker, FrontPage Magazine, Jihad Watch, Family Security Matters, Accuracy In Media, Newsbusters, Israel National News, Jewish Press, J-The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, and many others.